You will always find the download info on the Mageia download page; direct (ftp and http) and BitTorrent downloads are available.

The Mageia online repositories

The Mageia software sits in three different repositories/media, depending on the type of license applied to each package. Here's an overview of those repositories:

Core: The Core repository includes packages with free-open-source software, i.e. packages licensed under a free-open-source license, the set of the "Core" media along with "Core Release" and "Core Updates" are available by default.

Nonfree: The Nonfree repository includes packages that are free-of-charge, i.e. Mageia may redistribute them, but they contain closed-source software (hence the name - Nonfree). For example this repository includes nVidia and ATI graphics card proprietary drivers, firmware for various WiFi cards, etc.The Nonfree media set is added by default but not enabled by default.

Tainted: The Tainted repository includes packages released under a free license. The main criteria for placing packages in this repository is that they may infringe on patents and copyright laws in some countries, e.g. multimedia codecs needed to play various audio/video files; packages needed to play commercial video DVD, etc. The Tainted media set is added by default but not enabled by default, i.e. it's completely opt-in; so check your local laws before using packages from this repository. This repository is only added for the convenience of the users. This repository is to Mageia what PLF is to Mandriva users or RPM Fusion is to Fedora users.

Also note, that on a 64 bit system, the 32 bit repositories are also added. If the nonfree or tainted 64 bit repositories are enabled, the corresponding 32 bit repositories should also be enabled, as they are needed by some packages, such as skype.

Major new features

btrfs is now supported as a default filesystem - when selecting it for /boot ( or / without a separate /boot partition ) grub2 will be automatically chosen and configured.

grub2 (optional and not the default) should now work better out of the box and detects other installed operating systems and adds them to grub2 boot menu.

Installation on UEFI machines is now straightforward.

We now use the standard Adwaita theme instead of Oxygen-gtk, as the latter is broken with gtk+-3.14.

Packaging:

We now use the new standard for weak dependencies.

Our packages’ spec files use the new standard for dependencies’ exclusion (making them less different from Fedora/Suse/etc. packages).

Installation

Stage 1

Support for Alpha/IA64/PPC/SPARC was dropped.

Include the paravirtual network driver for Hyper-V.

We now automatically load the platform driver.

Stage 2

We now use the Adwaita theme instead of the Oxygen-gtk theme.

We now default to use GPT partitioning instead of full disk LVM on disks bigger than 4GB.

UEFI integration works quite a lot better.

The installer does not crash when running inside Virtual PC (it always worked fine under Hyper-V).

Input devices:

We now rely on the modern evdev driver (+udev) for input devices instead of the old mouse & keyboard drivers.

Wacom tablets should work better (we now use the proper Wacom driver again).

Synaptics touchpads should now work during install (mga#11524).

Users are now created with User-IDs (= UIDs) bigger than 1000 instead of the previous 500.

Localisation (l10n) / Internationalisation (i18n)

Firefox and Thunderbird have been now automatically install the proper -l10n-xx language pack according to installed locales-xx package. If multiple locales-xx packages are installed, the proper one should be selected to match the primary language that is configured for the system.

The man-pages-de package has been fixed: it now contains more then 530 man pages instead of 0 as before. (Thanks to Mario Blaettermann for the bugreports and fixes.)

Urpmi will handle both old Suggests (as inserted by rpm < 4.12) & new Recommends tags (as inserted by rpm-4.12+).
However, packages built with "Suggests:" with rpm-4.12 would use the new suggests tag which will be ignored by urpmi.

Mapping table:

rpm < 4.12.0 (old names)

rpm >= 4.12.0 (new names)

RPMTAG_RECOMMENDSNAME ​

RPMTAG_OLDRECOMMENDS​NAME

RPMTAG_SUGGESTSNAME

RPMTAG_OLDSUGGESTSNAME

n/a

RPMTAG_RECOMMENDNAME

n/a

RPMTAG_SUGGESTNAME

The first column shows tags inserted by the older RPM when the spec files contain a "Suggests: " line.

The second column shows tags inserted by new rpm-4.12 when the spec files contain a "Suggests: " line.

The tags in italic are not supported by urpmi. It only supports the old "suggests" tags (second line) and the new "recommends" tags (third line).

As such, format of synthesis files in media has been slightly changes. For mga5+, there are now "@recommends@" lines instead of "@suggests" ones

New dependencies generators

For some years, RPM supported two way to generate dependencies when building packages:

the old so-called "external" generators

the new so-called "internal" generators

Most distributions have switched to the new "internal" generators but we were still using the old "external" generators.

Mageia 5 has switched to use the new "internal" generators. This brings many advantages, e.g.:

As a side effect, the dependencies excluding mechanism has been changed.
It's extensively documented here

perl-URPM & urpmi

A hard-coded limit was fixed which prevented updating mga4 to mga5 due to some packages having a provides list longer than 64k characters.

Gurpmi will now runs drakbug when it crashes or segfaults, in order for us to get meaningful bug reports.

Tools

Authentication

Other

Base system

Kernel & hardware support

Mageia 5 ships with kernel 3.19, including the long awaited DMA-BUF + fences support (something that is needed as a base for proper upstream optimus & powerplay support).

All hardware managed by kernel-3.19 is enabled.

Wacom tablets should work better during installation. Moreover, Synaptics touchpads should now work during install bug 11524.

Nvidia drivers

Recently, Nvidia dropped support in their latest driver for the following range of chips: GeForce 8xxx, 9xxx and 100 to 415.
As a result, a new nvidia package had to be split out for those cards, it is now called nvidia340. Integration for this has been added to drakx11/XFdrake so the usual auto-detection for the correct driver should work again.
So there is now nvidia304 for GeForce 6xxx and GeForce 7xxx cards, the above-mentioned nvidia340 and nvidia-current for GeForce 420 and later cards.

If you perform an upgrade, the X.org config will be automatically fixed by the harddrake service on first boot.

init system

The remaining sysvinit legacy tools have been dropped.

Graphical environments

MageiaWelcome

X Window System (X11)

Mageia 5 ships with X.Org 1.16.4.

KDE

KDE 4.14.3 & Plasma 5.1.2 are provided.

It has a specific Live-DVD or can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

GNOME

GNOME 3.14 is provided

It has a specific Live-DVD or can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

For those prefering good old GNOME2, GNOME3 also provides a "Gnome Classic" session.

LXDE

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

XFCE

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer) or the Dual-arch DVD ISO.

LXQT (replacing RazorQt)

LXQt is the successor of RazorQt and replaces it during upgrades from Mageia 4. For more details also check the Errata entry
It cannot be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer) as there is simply not enough space to include all desktop environments and the packages they depend upon.
Online media need to be added to enable selection during initial installation - this is explained in installer documentation

Mate

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

Cinnamon

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

Enlightenment

It comes in its E18 latest version based on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.

Light window managers

Mageia 5 also provides a pletory of small and efficient window managers such as fvwm2, fvwm-crystal, i3, matchbox, openbox, windowmaker.

Phototonic has been added. It is a fast, lightweight, clean looking Qt/C++ photo viewer and organizer.

freshplayerplugin has been added - it is a wrapper that enables firefox to use the latest pepperflash flash player plugin that comes with Google Chrome. Latest pepperflash plugin still has to be downloaded manually, as it only comes with Google Chrome and Mageia cannot ship it by default. For more details see this forum thread , which offers a script that can automatically download the latest pepperflash plugin. (It is only needed if you do not want to install the latest Google Chrome and only want to use it in firefox.)

The mailcap package has been completed updated and synced with Fedora

Amateur Radio - Additions to the selection of radio related software in this release are: xdx, freedv, chirp and splat.

SDR - gqrx has been added to complement gnuradio, and offers an easy entry to the world of Software Defined Radio. Support for a wide range of SDR hardware is included.

Thanks to Juan Luis Baptiste, official docker images for Mageia are now available at the official docker site. For more details see this mailing list post on mageia developer mailing list.

Upgrading from Mageia 4

Upgrading from Mageia 4 is supported, and has been fine-tuned over the past few months, so it should work. But as always, it is very advisable to back up any important data before upgrading and make sure you have made all updates of Mageia 4 (such as rpm and urpmi). Upgrading from Mageia 3 or another distribution is not supported.

There are several ways to upgrade from one of the previous Mageia releases:

Warning: Upgrading an existing install using a LiveCD is NOT supported due to the LiveCD’s image being copied "as is" to the target system.

Upgrading via the Internet

The Mageia Update notification applet, Mageia Online, will notify you that a new Mageia release is available, and ask if you wish to upgrade. If you agree, the upgrade will be carried out from within your Mageia installation without any further steps being necessary.

If you have disabled the applet or it is not automatically running for some reason, you can upgrade manually either using the GUI (mgaonline) or the CLI (urpmi). Both methods are outlined below.

First make sure you have the latest updates for your currently running release prior to upgrading.

Upgrading online, using mgaonline (GUI)

If you do not see that mgaonline notifies you that there is a new release, check your options with mgaapplet-config

Or

su

mgaapplet-upgrade-helper --new_distro_version=5

It will notify you of the availability of the new Mageia 5 distribution, configure Mageia media sources and start migration.

Upgrading online, using urpmi (CLI)

You can also upgrade using urpmi from your favorite terminal emulator.
Here are the general upgrade steps:

Remove all of the existing media sources on your system by executing this command as root in terminal:

su

urpmi.removemedia -a

Add the Mageia 5 online sources, either:

Using the MIRRORLIST method (which will select a mirror automatically based on your geographical location):

It is recommended that the online repositories be set up during the upgrade as the DVD only includes a subset of the complete set of Mageia online repositories.

Moreover, it is possible that Mageia 4 may have received an update to a later version of software than that available on the ISO. When this happens, the upgrade may fail to complete. Since, at the time the ISO's are tested it is impossible to anticipate which Mageia 4 packages may be updated in the future, offline upgrades (i.e. upgrades attempted without setting up the online repositories) are not supported.

On the first reboot use the command 'urpmi --auto-update' to make sure all packages were updated.